Out of 274 fintech homepages studied, 47 sent back no content at all in their raw HTML. To an AI crawler that cannot run JavaScript, each of those sites is a blank page.
The analysis by Web Performance Tools, run on May 25, 2026, took its sample from the CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 list. For every homepage it compared two things: what a plain HTTP request returns, and what a full browser displays once the scripts have run.
The gap was wide. Some 36 percent of the homepages delivered less than 80 percent of their content in raw HTML, which means more than one-third of the leading names in the sector are largely out of reach for many AI agents. Fifty-five sites, or 20 percent of the sample, returned under 30 percent of their content without JavaScript. The 47 empty pages sit within that group.
Crawlers that do not render
The study reported that most AI crawlers, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot among them, read only the raw HTTP response and skip JavaScript. Google’s search engine is different. It has advanced rendering capabilities, while many newer AI crawlers do not, so the same page can be indexed and understood differently depending on who is reading it.
Web Performance Tools tied the finding to the “Structure” pillar of Machine-First Architecture. That principle says critical information should not depend on client-side JavaScript. The firm said fintech companies relying on scripts to load essential content may be narrowing their reach among the AI agents that now power everything from search to data analysis.
Its advice to developers was short: put the key information in the first HTTP response. Doing so, the firm said, matters for any broader engagement with AI systems.
For people who look up a loan or a digital wallet through an AI assistant, the practical effect is that a provider whose homepage is empty without scripts may never show up in the answer.
